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Santa Blogs XII

Posted on Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Hey, Santa Blogs, You Fat Old Fraud:

And I don’t care if you claim you’re not a fraud, because that leaves you with a couple of words you can’t deny. Remember me? I’m the one whose Mom keeps giving secondhand books, on your recommendation, and always about fuzzy bunnies and stuff instead of zombies or fanged, twinkling masters of the night. Bunnicula is not vampire enough for me: too fuzzy, and he never once eats anyone’s brain. AND the books always have inscriptions from before I was born, like “To My Own Ducky Wucky on Her Seventh Birthday-Worthday, October 12, 1935.” I can’t get past stuff like that to the book anyway. Howzabout telling my mother there are NEW books out there, and how about some red meat for a real reader, Whipped Cream Face?

Sicky Wicky

Dear Wiki:

Remember you? With your vocabulary and tact, how could I forget you? Your skill at personal relations, even with so powerful an entity as Santa Blogs marks you as one of Earth’s specials, Wiki: just like a lot of Book fair volunteers.

I’ve hinted this to you before, broccoli brittle, but you may have been too busy chewing the carpet to notice: people who get secondhand books as gifts tend to get more of them. It’s economics, see—they cost less—and it’s guilt, too. The buyer figures “Well, I’d better get a couple just in case she notices the dented corners or that the price on the endflap is $1.95.”

And I do not understand your attitude to old inscriptions, turnip nog. Of course, I do not marvel at what “ducky-wucky” does to your digestion: that’s probably why the poor dear got rid of the book in the first place. But inscriptions are like those vampires you admire so much, Wiki: they live through the ages, rising from the dark of your bookcase to recall that once there was a person who used the phrase “Birthday-Worthday”. If that isn’t horror, I don’t know what is. (It also sounds rather New Age: dibs on the rights to a whole line of life-affirming cards along the lines of Happy Worthday.)

As you grow up, Wiki, you will learn that, as much as we would like it, life is not really all vampires and zombies. It’s not fair, but that’s just the way it is.

Speaking of unfair, I need to point out that this is the last blog of 2012. I am once again off to the wild west to see hills of snow, IF it has snowed and IF they’ve added any hills to that part of the west since I was there last. The library will be CLOSED for half of the time I will be away, and I would rather not find that you have packed the dock with banana boxes while I was away. Wait for January, when it will be more fun to watch the steam of my muttered comments as I labor outdoors.

Read books (on a Kindle or Nook, if you must), keep warm, and check this website in January for my thrilling report on What I Did On My Vacation. L’chaim!

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